Would have been better with more of an open world approach. The linearity did it no favors. You do get some cool abilities with the arm though.

*groan*

Far be it from me to rationalize an underdeveloped game, but let me blip for a sentence or two. I just know if they had done an open world I would've never ever touched that. You're a bionic man on a mission, not a friendly neighborhood costume swinging for groceries. "Oh look, Tony's got that veal in stock. Fresh meat. It's now or never!" True, it underperformes in several places, mostly in boss enemies. Yet I'll say that it will give you a fix if you're out for some action. # bionic swingers

Rearmed 2 was an iffy, point-missing follow-up to one of the best remakes there's ever been - and I generally wouldn't trust a remake as far as I could throw it. Rearmed improved on almost every aspect of the original game in terms of its mechanics and overall 'feel', and had a really gorgeous, warm, high-bloom visual style. It's chock full of genuinely compelling and interesting challenges outside the main story (mainly to do with your unique mode of traversal), and Simon Viklund's interpretations of its music were all great, too. It's on PC now, and frequently on sale for next to nothing, so I highly recommend checking it out.

Cheers, will investigate. I do enjoy the original and I'd heard good stuff about RA, so I was quite surprised to find the sequel so bland. I'll see how much it's going for on XBL later.

No, I got you. You prefer more, ah, space to work with. Not the yanking of the chain. Fair enough.

Say, did you ever come in contact with Killer7? It's close to satirical the way it depicts "free roaming". Gotta love it.

I haven't played K7, but I remember reading such about it when it came out.

In other news I picked up Hotline Miami 2 after playing through the first one. Haven't started it yet but see what others are talking about. Rarely is a game better on subsequent plays, but sonuvabitch here I am digging it more he 2nd time around.

Speaking of digging (insta kill) games I've played through Katana Zero a lot. Getting through the game on normal is a joke now as I've been concentrating on hard. First go around on hard I died 800 times, 2nd I died 350, most recent I died 149. Started a 4th play and I'd like to see if I can get that below 100.

Like a good shmup KZ allows you to see improvement the more time you spend with it.

fuck meandering open world shit immensely. BC2009 may be a bit rough around the edges, but its linearity is a huge benefit to it as a game. the focus allows for the levels to actually be designed around particular acrobatics and makes for a much more interesting experience. i feel like that game was maligned for all the wrong reasons - it certainly could have made the boundaries more obvious, but it going open world would have made it so much worse. thank god it wasn't just another spider-man game, the swinging actually had some skill intensity and a learning curve to it.

as far as BC:R - 1 is amazing and 2 is godawful, it's rare there's such a tremendous gulf between the quality of a sequel and its original when they still share staff like that. 1 takes lessons from both the original nes game and the game boy game and makes something better than either of them, and i say that as a huge fan of both the nes & gb games.

_________________~Imagination and memory are but one thing, which for diverse considerations have diverse names~|~*~*~*~*~*~* If there's a place that I could be ~ Then I'd be another memory*~*~*~*~*~*~

Graveyard Keeper, it's...okay sadly, the idea of Stardew Valley but based on running a graveyard, doing experiments, being a necromancer bastard and all while running a church should make for a much more engaging game than this.

Instead it's a simulation game that has boring grind, annoying UI and even just exploring the world feels like it takes ages, even if you have a teleport stone, i really really want to like this game just on it's premise alone, but, you know, it just makes me want to play something like Stardew Valley or Slime Rancher instead.

Power Drift [Saturn].Man, I have absolutely no fucking idea how to deal with the last stage in every course. I'm getting shit like 5th place every time.I'm not 100% sure how to even attempt sharp corners in the game. I'll sometimes get the grip I need, sometimes I'll get more grip than I need and fall inwards off the course, and sometimes I'll get absolutely no grip and fall outwards off the course.I don't have a clear idea of how I'm supposed to handle them, because I'm pretty sure I'm taking the corners about the same way each time.

also, sometimes I'll just get hit by something [oncoming car I can't even hope to react to, car behind me I can't see, piece of side geometry that apparently extends further out than I thought] and that's the end of my run

_________________eyesoul, an uncomfortably euroshmup-like game I made. Rolling Start arcade racing game forum.

I always found Sega's games split firmly into two camps - those where the mechanics seems to have been developed alongside the audio-visuals and everything felt really balanced (Space Harrier, OutRun, Super Hang-On), and those where they seemed to have decided to push things as hard as possible, with the result that the gameplay was never quite as tight as it could be. I'd definitely include Power Drift in the latter, it's an absolute spectacle to look at, but never plays quite as tightly as I'd like. Still huge fun though.

Downloaded the BC:RE demo. It's Even from the few moments it offered it's apparent that it's far better than the sequel. Will be picking up for sure.

I enjoyed the first AC decently, though it didn't leave much of an impression. I really liked the second game though. It's a casual game, and you gotta take it for what it is, but as a playful recreation of 15th century Italy, I had as much fun as I could.I even enjoyed it enough that I also managed to play through the second and third time they made that same game. Eventually.

But then Assassin's Creed 3 happened, and there was no way I could drag myself through that slog. I heard Black Flag is a lot better, so it's really too bad it's being gatekept by that one.

Was all ready to get into AC2 back in the day but I guess was expecting a bit much. The way you climb walls has become one of my pet peeves in modern gaming. But I can see how they can be fun if you are into the fantasy they offer. That's probably why I enjoyed the Lord of the Rings reskin more, put a dozen or so hours into the first one of those.

I enjoyed the first AC decently, though it didn't leave much of an impression. I really liked the second game though. It's a casual game, and you gotta take it for what it is, but as a playful recreation of 15th century Italy, I had as much fun as I could.I even enjoyed it enough that I also managed to play through the second and third time they made that same game. Eventually.

Pretty much this

1 is horrible by most metrics. 2 is the litmus test for whether you like the series or not, and once you've played that, well. May as well not play any of the rest.. Still, I do like Brotherhood.

I enjoyed the first AC decently, though it didn't leave much of an impression. I really liked the second game though. It's a casual game, and you gotta take it for what it is, but as a playful recreation of 15th century Italy, I had as much fun as I could.

I played a lot of AC:Brotherhood on Onlive.

It was probably the shining star example of a game that works on the platform.Like, it really is pretty casual, but as a result, the massive latency increase doesn't hurt it that badly.

_________________eyesoul, an uncomfortably euroshmup-like game I made. Rolling Start arcade racing game forum.

Finished Hollow Knight for the second time, on Switch this time. I had previously cleared it on PC before any of the DLC were out, and even then I didn't go after the TLB because I wanted to start playing something else. This time, when I got the sweet collector's edition Switch release from Fangamer, I decided to beat it properly. The Radiance wasn't terribly difficult in the end, only took me ~10 or so tries to beat.

Still not going to touch Godhome. I do want to play some other games this year...

_________________No matter how good a game is, somebody will always hate it. No matter how bad a game is, somebody will always love it.

Played a few short games of Cuphead and loved it. Will definitely put some more time into this after I've played through the Contra collection.

Speaking of which, I managed a 1cc in the original Arcade game a few weeks ago and I've been playing Super Contra since. Was so close to a 1cc a couple of times last night. The closest getting to the last boss with 3 lives, and instead of just cheesing him I tried to dodge everything and died. Oh well, I should get it this week and immensely looking forward to III (I'll come back to the NES ports another time). EDIT: I just did it! Very happy. Really enjoyed this game, despite it's issues.

Recently bought God of War used for cheap, but I got bored pretty soon. It looks great, and has an interestingish story, but the gameplay (or lack of) doesn't do much for me. I swore off these type of games after Unchartered 4, but I guess I got sucked in by the hype machine. Never again.

Had one playthrough of Sonic Mania, and it seemed fun but embarrassingly, it felt like I had forgotten how to play a Sonic game. Do I go fast and fly through as quick as I can, or do I stop and explore the level? I'm sure I was way overthinking it, but playing fast definitely was more fun. All felt a tad easy though.

Cuphead is so wonderful. Way tighter mechanically than it might appear at first, intricately designed, and just a joy to play.

I've been playing a hell of a lot of the Switch port of Virtua Racing. What can I say? An immaculate M2 conversion and just a super precise, fun game that is incredibly enjoyable in small bursts. I've been practicing the Medium course and have worked myself up to the low 200s in the rankings, which surprisingly still isn't good enough to get 1st place against the AI drivers. Has me hankering to play the arcade cab again after all these years, hopefully I can find one in the Chicagoland area. Unfortunately the netcode is pretty terrible from the matches I've played so far, but hopefully I can set up some private races soon.

_________________We here shall not rest until we have made a drawing-room of your shaft, and if you do not all finally go down to your doom in patent-leather shoes, then you shall not go at all.

Fighters Megamix [Saturn].Sitting down, unlocking stuff. Gonna be annoyed when my Saturn save-RAM battery dies and I have to do all this over again. Really cool game. I love the dodging from VF3. The game is fairly pretty, with nicely smooth shaded characters.There's a lot of slowdown on some stages though, especially with Candy/Honey's alternate outfit. One fight felt like I was doing the VF2 underwater fight with Dural half the time.

still really curious as to whether this is my Saturn in particular, some kind of overhead from using Pseudo Saturn, or something else, because I haven't seen people complaining about a lot of the slowdown I'm seeing in many games

[edit]Also, I was playing Sonic 3 & Knuckles on the Saturn via Sonic Jam.

god, Marble Garden still kinda sucksloads of random crushers, those big spiked balls on the chain consistently just get me even though I know where they are and have been playing this game for like 20 years now, and then needing the drill top to proceed in certain areas is a pain in the dickmuch of the platforming isn't too bad, but the level just makes some really offputting choices regarding how it handles its hazards

Sonic Jam isn't the best set of ports either, and whoever handled the sound did zero volume balancing.so the menu music will be blaringly loud, then you go in game and it's fairly quiet, and then you use the insta-shield or use the electric shield double jump and hear this crazy loud sound effectand then many of the sound effects are kind of different, usually for the worse -- the new boss hit noise is great and sounds really heavy, while the explosions you hear after are awfulthe ring noise is shit and sounds like it was hastily run through a filter to make it sound fancier or somethingthe aforementioned shields have really screwy sounding SFX, ignoring the complete lack of volume balancingit's a mess

Sonic World is cool, but the camera pisses me off really badly the entire time. Having time attack is neat, but I think it enables the "Normal" level layouts [which are easier than the "Original" ones]. Might need to double-check that, but eh. Also, the time-attack menu BGM is awful and really fucking loud.

_________________eyesoul, an uncomfortably euroshmup-like game I made. Rolling Start arcade racing game forum.

I like the game, but I'm struggling with the uneven difficulty; it felt like I was being dropped into a completely different game the first time I fought dark samus.It also feels a lot harder to bomb jump than it did in the first one, something about the camera angles in this game seem designed to screw you up.

I loved Prime. I bought 2 and 3 and NEVER played them, eventually sold them.

It took me 4 years to start playing Prime 2, and when I did, I got so frustrated at the first battle with Dark Samus that I put it down for 6 months. It's interesting enough though. The gameplay dynamics revolve around a light and dark world that overlap each other somewhat, and you have to use the light and dark guns to solve environmental puzzles. If you liked 1, then Echoes is at least worth it one time. It's way less frustrating than say Resident Evil 5-6 quicktime scenes.

I'm playing the Sega arcade classic I'm Sorry, which is about Japan's corrupt Prime Minister, Kakuei Tanaka avoiding various celebrities in mazes while collecting bars of gold. It's funny, and very well designed. All fans of Pacman should seek it out.

_________________

Quote:

There was a time, in the era of great chaos, when the Earth and the moon were at war with each other. A daredevil from the moon piloted a bizarre aircraft. It was feared, and because of its shape, called... Einhander.